Thursday, February 15, 2018

“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The two women, Elena and Lila, have both grown into married adults, but have also grown apart. Elena is married to a university professor and has moved to Florence, while Lila is working in a sausage factory on the outskirts of Naples. Elena’s novel is a huge, if risqué, hit, reviewed in all the major Italian newspapers. She travels the country, staying in fancy hotels, and giving lectures on her writing. But soon all is not well. After giving birth, she feels the strains of family life. Suddenly her leg begins to hurt, reminding her of her crippled mother’s, her baby never sleeps and refuses to nurse from her breast, and her husband is too distracted by his work to help out around the house. Despite all her worldly success, Elena is still shackled by the traditional roles expected of a married woman in Italy. Lila, meanwhile, struggles through her life in Naples, raising a child out of wedlock, and living together with an old neighborhood friend, Enzo, in an ambiguously sexual relationship. Power, sex, and tradition all intermingle as these women try to navigate and defy social expectations in post-war Italy.

What ties the novel together is the ongoing politicization of Italy. The country is being divided between the Fascists and the Communists. There are pitched battles in the streets every day. The universities have been taken over by radical students, who berate their own professors and spend all day out of class and plotting revolution. The workers in the factories are organizing, while gangs of fascist thugs, recruited from the slums, menace any leftist political gathering, carrying metal pipes and knives. One cannot help but have a political opinion. Italy is on fire and both Elena and Lila are caught in the middle. Despite time and distance, however, they cannot seem to break the childhood bond between them, for better or for worse.

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